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Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into humorous, creative and regularly moving plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and feeling flawlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he often explored in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, ethics, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced mad and imprisoned in a cell with an real lunatic who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a